It’s rush hour in the skies
Over Scipio Center today
Evidently, Spring is here as
The geese are on their way!
Wing to wing and tail to beak
They darken the sky overhead
From Owasco Lake to the fields nearby
That serve as their nightly bed.
They honk and honk as they fly on by;
So many, so loud it seems
When there’s rush hour traffic over Scipio
I can hear these geese in my dreams!
I, like most of Wyckoff Road north of Hunter Road, belonged to the Wyckoff Highlanders 4-H Club through the mid-50’s and 60’s. I don’t know the origin of the club name, but it was around for a long time. Our skills were mainly in baking, sewing, raising animals and gardening. That’s because those were the skills of the volunteer leaders we had.
Our leaders were our parents. We attended a meeting, paid dues and elected officers, conducted business and then some part of the meeting would be dedicated to an activity.
We had a lot of fun at those meetings, and we learned a lot too. I remember attending a session on basic electricity, taught at the (by then abandoned) one-room School #2 on the corner of Wyckoff and Skillett Roads. One parent taught us how to properly iron a shirt, with gusto! I learned to sew almost anything from another cherished leader and got the blue ribbons to prove it.
We baked muffins and biscuits; pies and cakes. Of course we needed to practice, so our families were our lab rats. To this day I will not choose cherry pie for dessert and I have 2 older sisters to thank for that!
According to the Auburn Citizen of November 7, 1954, Cynthia Stoker (my sister) and her cousin Joan Minde entered, for the second year, the cherry pie contest held at NYSEG, then located on North Street in Auburn. After the judges were through, Cynthia won by a mere 2 points over her cousin Joan – the exact opposite of the previous year. The article contains the entire recipe. When I shared a copy with these two ladies, they had lots more memories to talk about.
We also did “demonstrations” at the 4-H Center, then a pretty new building on Grant Avenue. We demonstrated the proper way to measure ingredients, how to make a carrot curl or a radish rose; maybe how to build a birdhouse.
The learning took place over several years, and not only did we learn skills that we use in the regular course of our lives, we learned a lot more.
I learned how to speak in public without going to pieces if my carrots didn’t curl – I think my mother called it “improvising.”
I learned to follow someone else’s lead.
I learned to pay attention and learn from doing.
And I learned that everybody has something to offer. We just need to find it within ourselves.
WARM WINTER
No ice on the lake
No snow on the ground;
The ducklings are following
Their mother around
Out on the lake
In single file.
Guess I’ll sit on the dock
And watch for awhile.
Bluejays and cardinals,
Woodpeckers too
Fly up to the feeders –
It’s like a bird zoo!
My breath comes out white clouds
As I trudge up the hill
I see lots of turkeys
Behind the old mill.
They’re pecking away
At some corn they have found
I get pretty close
Without making a sound.
Then something alerts them;
A shadow, a breath
And I watch them run off
Afraid of their death.
I leave them alone;
I’ve seen enough for one day
And head for the house
Just up the way.
A wintertime walk
Leaves me tired but refreshed.
Oh, look, out the window –
Is that a robin’s nest?
A lot of people who research their ancestry are interested not only in finding our who they descend from, but where they came from and what conditions were like. It’s difficult to imagine walking from Sherwood to Aurora instead of driving it in 10 minutes; much less remembering to take your gun and knife in case of bears or wolves, and following a blazed trail through a forest of trees 50 feet or more tall. On a recent research trip to the NYS Archives in Abany, I was thinking about neighboring towns that used to be included in Scipio. Not only towns, but counties. I picked up a book titled “History of Seneca County New York 1766 to 1876.”
Chapter 3 starts off like this: “At the close of the Revolution northern and western New York was a wilderness, but the march of armies and the forays of detachments had made known the future promise of these erst untrodden regions, and Companies, State and Government, took immediate steps as policy and duty seemed to dictate, to acquire their ownership. It is notable that the seasons seemed to conspire to render the woods untenable to the Indians when the time approached for the first few isolated settlements of adventurous pioneers. The winter of 1779 – 1800 was marked by its unprecedented severity. All western New York lay covered by a blanket of snow full five feet in depth. Wild animals, hitherto numerous, perished by thousands. The dissolving snow in Spring disclosed the forests filled with the carcasses of the deer, and the warlike Senecas became dependents on English bounty and hoped for British success.”
These few paragraphs, flowery as they are, still paint a vivid portrait of what that winter was like. Imagine our early settlers, most living in crude buildings or log huts of one or two rooms, huddled around a fireplace while the wind outside howled and the snow banks piled up against the walls of the house and the barns and outbuildings. Imagine going outside for more wood, or to feed and care for the livestock. An illness serious or life-threatening enough to need a doctor’s presence would require a ride through snowdrifts in a forest filled with hungry predators, if there was even a doctor close enough to return. People learned to be self-sufficient, or they did not stay long in the wilderness that was New York.
Sometimes my friends ask me why I enjoy genealogy so much. It can be difficult, frustrating work. I try to explain the thrill of making a breakthrough; of finding a document, or seeing a photograph of someone for the first time and recognizing set of the jaw or other physical characteristic as a family trait.
The real reason I enjoy family research is subliminal and harder to define. Many people come in and out of our lives; some we make a special connection with. Families help us understand more clearly who we are, by helping us see where we came from. And there is one family member who has become very special to me. I quite possibly would never have gotten to know her except through my hobby of genealogical research; and also quite possibly, I would never have started doing this research without having known her.
The first time I spoke with my cousin Susan was in the winter of 1996. My father had passed away the year before, and my sisters and I had completed the arduous task of sorting and removing all his household goods and selling the property. I had put aside some boxes of papers and a family Bible but had not had the strength yet to look at them.
Susan called, introduced herself to me, and told me she had been doing some family research. She had recently been laid up with a lot of pain in her back and leg, so had started her research just to have something to do. We talked about how we were related and what information we had. I promised to look through some of my father’s papers and contact her.
When I did, I heard the disheartening news that she had discovered that the cause of her pain was bone cancer. Susan became very busy with doctors and treatments, and I got busy with my family research.
I brought out my father’s family papers and looked through them. I bought a genealogy program for my computer and started looking online for information. Before I knew it, I was hooked like a fish on a line.
Susan went into remission and we got together to share what we had. My father’s papers were a wealth of information and Susan had a lot of her own, different information. We visited cemeteries and relatives, libraries and websites. Our hunger knew no bounds. Susan had a camera and tripod and we carted it everywhere, asking relatives we had just met if we could photograph their pictures during a visit. Really we were quite shameless.
From our online explorations, we had connected with family members who were also searching their past. Everyone had another piece of the puzzle and our family tree grew and grew.
In our cemetery ramblings, we discovered that a great-uncle’s gravestone had been vandalized. He had fought in the Civil War and died at an early age as a result of his injuries. We were in contact through e-mail with his direct descendants who lived in California and Utah. We all agreed that we needed to replace Richard’s stone, but didn’t know quite how to go about it.
I contacted our local Veteran’s Office in 2002 and discovered that we could submit paperwork for a replacement marker. Our family research and documentation came in handy for this project; we had everything necessary and were approved. The next question was how were we going to commemorate the occasion?
Richard’s descendants decided that it was time for a trip east to be a part of the ceremony and to visit their roots. Other cousins who lived closer decided they would like to join us as well. So Susan and I began to plan what looked like a sizeable family reunion.
Now, it was 2003, and while Susan’s cancer was in remission it was most certainly not gone. She continued to take medications that would bring many people to their knees, just to survive. Her activities had to be planned around her treatments and her ability to be physically active, depending on her medication regimen. Her bones developed holes, and then regrew. Walking was difficult even with her cane and her vision was poor. My health was good, but I was no spring chicken and I worked a full-time job.
Susan went full steam ahead. She updated her family tree and printed off a twenty-one page horizontal tree. We hung it across the back wall of my garage since it was over twenty feet long! I made an official program that included Richard’s family information and contacted the local newspaper. We cajoled our relatives into bringing food, tables and chairs. Everything fell into place. The big day grew closer and the west coast relatives began to arrive. We got a telephone call – Julia and Don were in town. Nervously, we gave them directions to Susan’s house.
They knocked on the door and walked in. I was looking at my grandmother’s eyes! Julia smiled and Susan gave her a hug. It felt like we had known each other for years.
We stayed and talked for hours. More relatives came the next day, and it was always the same. There were no strangers here. We spent many happy hours visiting and showing them our favorite places – the cemeteries, family homesteads and records offices.
Susan had arranged her medications for that month so she would be at her most alert and active during the week of the reunion and ceremony. She thought of every detail from tablecloths to flags for the cemetery. The newspaper interviewed Richard’s descendants and attended the gravesite cemetery, running a nice article in our local Sunday paper.
The day of the reunion dawned and Susan was at my door before I had a chance to drink a cup of coffee. We strung flags and streamers, and of course set up the infamous camera and tripod. Susan hung a wall-sized map of the county too.
Over fifty family members came to our reunion. Some met for the first time. We exchanged addresses and telephone numbers; we took pictures and told stories. Everyone found himself or herself on Susan’s tree. The food was excellent and of course some of it was made from old family recipes that were then shared. We had relatives there from the ages of ninety-three to three. Susan and I were furiously taking notes while our relatives talked about their memories.
The day passed too quickly. Before I knew it everyone but Susan was gone. She looked exhausted, but happier than I had ever seen her.
Susan’s cancer came back to visit last year. She has unexplained seizures now, probably the result of the accumulation in her body of some of the terrible medications she has taken for so many years to keep herself alive. They occur with no warning or pattern. Sometimes her vision or her memory deserts her, or her ability to stand and walk. She has been to see so many doctors that she has to write them down to remember them. But on her good days, I cannot keep up with her. Susan lives every moment she has to the fullest. She has taught me that to do less is wasteful. She looks back at our ancestors who came to a place where they knew no one, and toiled to make a better life for their children and grandchildren. They lived every day by giving all they had. I think that is a lesson we would all do well to remember.
Is there really any such thing as “simple” sorrow? I believe there is. I believe it is sorrow at its most basic form, sorrow so deep that nothing else exists.
Recent events triggered this poem on “Simple Sorrow:”
She drew her hair behind one ear
And hopelessly she sighed
And squinting at the screen she typed
“Who oh who am I?
Alone I sit, alone I stand
I wait to see his smile
But by myself I will remain
For yet a good long while.
He’s been gone for these ten years
Was it an accident, or fate?
Now my spare time I give to thoughts
And mem’ries of that date.
Every day, he fades further away
He gets so hard to see
I close my eyes, and then I sigh-
He was so dear to me.”
She looked around the empty room
And rose to walk away
There’d be no answer to this pain
On this or any day.
Sandie Gilliland
5/3/2011
A family is a funny, fluid sort of thing. What do you think of when you hear the word “family?”
Maybe Ozzie and Harriett. The Beav. Sky King and his niece, Penny? The eighties brought us Peg and Al Bundy. Then came Homer and Marge. Lately, it’s Wisteria Lane, or Sally Fields who has morphed her way from flying in her wimple to being the matriarch of a family.
Family reunion. We are family. I’ve got all my sisters with me. Tradition. Marriage. Children. Cousins. Crowded Christmas and Thanksgiving celebrations with folding chairs, kid’s tables, cold squash, soggy-bottomed pies and a guarantee that someone winds up crying in a corner. I could not wait to escape the ever-present family. I grew up, moved out and moved on. But after the first few years of freedom and privacy, I realized I was alone out there in some very basic and important way despite having a family now of my own. Their absence had left a huge hole in my life. I had no one to tell the little unimportant things to that mattered so much. I found myself remembering some of the things that at the time had seemed awful, things that had made me feel put upon, singled out and under inspection so no matter what I did, I could not escape the family. These same things now brought a smile to my face as I realized how they had shaped my youth and made me the person I am today.
My family, after crossing the Atlantic Ocean, apparently decided that was quite enough travel and spent the next 5 generations within a 50-mile radius of each other in central New York. This meant there were always lots of cousins and grandparents, aunts and uncles nearby. Half the kids on my school bus were related to me. We were farmers; everyone pitched in with the chores and harvesting the crops so we saw a lot of each other in the evenings, and on weekends as well.
Even our recreation was centered on family. Friday nights, we took turns; one family or another would pile everyone into their car and drive to another family’s house. There, the adults would play cards in the kitchen while the kids all amused themselves. We would make ourselves scarce, heading for the haymow while it was still daylight to practice swinging and jumping from its dizzying heights without permission. Maybe in colder weather we’d play a game of Uncle Wiggly or Parcheesi on the floor in the living room while the older kids ignored us or told us scary stories that made us cry. Once in a while, someone even had a television set so we got to watch that. Usually the kids got to have popcorn or maybe even potato chips, a real treat to us. The adults might have a highball or two.
When the card game ended, the host family got out whatever they might have enough of in the refrigerator and the grown-ups made a sandwich. Sometimes it was cold cuts, sometimes it was onions from the garden and a little cheese; maybe there would be a tin of sardines or some Limburger cheese and some saltine crackers. My father was particularly fond of Limburger cheese, and I remember holding my nose just to get it out of the refrigerator! It didn’t have to be much, or even store-bought. It just had to be enough to be shared with the family.
At the end of the evening, the youngest of us would walk or sometimes be carried out to the car and try to stay awake in the backseat for the short ride home.
The main rules we had to follow on these occasions were simple: don’t be too loud, don’t be rude to the grown–ups, and do not bleed or throw up on anything. If we forgot or ignored the rules we were generally reminded of our transgressions when we arrived home so they wouldn’t be repeated. Pretty much we succeeded.
Sunday was a family day too. The eight of us would have a big Sunday dinner about one o’clock, with the main course usually consisting of whatever chicken had dug up my mother’s flowerbed the week before. Afterwards we read the Sunday paper, each of us with our own section in a comfortable silence in the sunny front room. On cold days the big coal furnace kept us toasty and warm. I would eventually manage to claim custody of the comic section from my older siblings, and try to silly putty my favorites. Even mom joined us for a bit since the big meal of the day was done, and Sunday night meant only soup, sandwiches and Walt Disney. My father would without fail wind up snoozing in his big chair, half the sports section draped over his lap and face like a poorly placed blanket.
In my family, I am the youngest of six. In some ways this was a good thing growing up. My parent’s limits had been stretched and their expectations of behavior adjusted by my five older siblings, and that gave me a much greater freedom of movement than a first or second child could have expected. My parents already knew that I would inevitably skin my knees by falling or jumping where I shouldn’t, and would climb too high or reach too far and break an arm or a leg in the process. They were adjusted to the inevitability of misbehavior, rashes, scratches and karmic accident, so they only sweated the really big stuff.
The bad part of being the youngest of six is that my parents had also had been played by my siblings, masters all, and so my excuses and fibs were easy to see through, flimsy as that lace curtain that somehow got turned into a dress for my pet rabbit when mom wasn’t looking. I did win a red ribbon at the county fair in the pet parade that year!
I still think that these peculiarities of birth order provided me with an imagination and a verbal prowess that would never have been achieved had I been first or second out of the gate. I read books that were way over my head, and worked at deciphering conversations of my older sisters who were trying to talk while keeping their secrets from me so I wouldn’t blab to our mother and get them grounded.
I also became very good at “not blinking” after my sister told me that mom could tell when I lied by seeing how often I blinked. I practiced in front of the mirror until in my humble opinion I could not blink with the best of them. I don’t know how my mother kept a straight face while I told her my tale of why my new jacket had a big rip in it, all the while with my eyes open as wide as they would go in order to avoid blinking.
Families were a lot about appearances, too. My mother worried about my uncanny ability to get dirty without even trying. She sighed a lot when we needed to go somewhere. I was always being told to sit up and stay clean, don’t wrinkle that dress and for goodness sake put the puppy down! I really thought I was done for, on the Easter morning that my mother got me dressed for church early, then left me sitting alone while she got ready. I don’t know what possessed her that year when I was six or seven years old.
Easter in those years of growing up was the one time when we all got gussied up; brand new dresses, gloves, hats and shiny dress shoes and off to church we went. My mother usually set my hair in pin curls the night before, in a vain attempt to make me resemble Shirley Temple.
We took our family picture on Easter Sunday before church, and I love looking back at all those hopeful young faces squinting into the sunshine, or sometimes looking a bit cold and shivery in a little snow. I’m usually the short one in front not looking at the camera, clutching at a cat that would obviously prefer to be anywhere else in the world, with ringlets askew and her hat just about to fall off.
So mom had left me alone that fateful Easter morning, dressed like a lady in a pretty new dress and still-shiny patent leather shoes with lacy white socks, sitting in the parlor with a stern warning not to so much as budge from the chair. This was pretty boring, and my Easter basket was nearby. I remember even now how much I loved those tattoos of chickens and bunnies and Easter lilies that only required a little water to adhere to your skin. I thought how pretty they would look with my nice outfit. And if I couldn’t budge, well, what was spit anyways but water?
Yup, you guessed it. By the time mom came to get me a few minutes later, I had managed to transfer 3 or 4 of those temporary tattoos to my hands and arms. I was pretty proud of such ingenuity, and looked up smiling to show off what I had accomplished.
It took about a half a second for me to realize that my mother did not share my affinity for temporary tattoos. I give her a lot of credit for the fact that I survived to talk about the day.
We marched into the bathroom where I proceeded to have my skin scrubbed to a rosy finish. Those tattoos didn’t quite come off but they were a whole lot lighter by the time mom got through with me!
My aunts and uncles have mostly retired by now. My father and mother play no more card games. Cousins finished school, starting families of their own and moving away. Some have stayed in touch but we’ve lost that close and easy familiarity of years gone by, when we could lay on our back in the hay mow and among the warm and pleasant smells of fresh mown hay and warm lowing cattle, talk for hours about anything or nothing. We shared our hopes, our dreams, and looked out for each other through our growing up years.
The definition of a family today is more generous in some ways than it used to be. But the basic definition, a group of people you care deeply about and share your life with, will never change. Thank God for family.
